leaping in place

leaping in place (2012) was composed as part of a commissioning project for piano pieces based on the themes of Beethoven's Third Symphony. In this case, instead of presenting the theme I was given (I defy any listener to identify which one it was) in any recognizable form, I imagined it to be the common endpoint of disparate developmental narratives, each excavating different possible histories. Following these four "imagined genealogies", I drew upon the theme to extract a "ghazal", although one that does not reproduce any of the formal characteristics of the original Arabic poetic form. The inspiration for the use of this moniker comes instead from the ghazals in Lorca's The Tamarit Divan, whose elegant simplicity and opacity I tried to evoke.

leaping in place was premiered by Daniel Schlosberg on September 16th, 2012 at Chicago's National Pastime Theater as part of the International Beethoven Festival's Bagatelle Project.